A number of you have sent in suggestions and links to tools, utilities and software that's either designed for NetWare, works with NetWare or is simply useful on a NetWare network. Today, I want to point to a few of these in the hopes that one or more might be of interest to you.

First up, a company that has been supporting NetWare for quite some time: Adrem Software. Most of you know Adrem because it makes available, for free, the Adrem Remote Console for NetWare servers, a much more secure tool than NetWare's included Rconsole.

But there's more available from the company, including the Adrem Server Manager, soon to release in a new version, 5.0. The company assures me that Server Manager can be used on all versions of NetWare from 4.2 through the latest Open Enterprise Server (NetWare kernel), and it intends to keep this functionality in future versions.

Another product and company that I've previously mentioned, but should point to again, is the Blackbird Group and its eDirectory tool DeTroubler. Blackbird calls DeTroubler "The answer to all your disaster recovery needs for your directory," and that's not really an exaggeration.

DeTroubler works by reading eDirectory information and then writing it into an SQL database file, which is then available for file backup by your existing SMS-based backup solution. Should you need to, you can restore single objects or large parts of your tree rapidly, with just a few mouse clicks. DeTroubler also supports an automatic full tree restore, without manual intervention. DeTroubler has no dependencies on any schema changes, fully supports Inherited Rights filters (IRF) and all the hidden attributes (including Public/Private Key Pairs, Novell Secret Store, Certificates and Key Material Objects). It's another one of those tools that let's you sleep better at night.

Still, sometimes you just have to roll your own when it comes to NetWare utilities. And for those of you "of a certain age," Pascal was probably one of the first programming languages you learned. Now you can both relive your youth as well as design your own NetWare utilities with Free Pascal 2.0, an open source version of the language that fully supports NetWare's C programming libraries (Libc) to enable you to completely customize your own tools. Check the documentation to see if this is something you'd use but given the price (free) I'm sure there's one utility you could find the time to create. If you do, and if it's useful, think about releasing it (perhaps through Novell's own Cool Tools) to benefit the entire NetWare community. Maybe, a year from now, I'll be telling people about your new application.

To contact Dave Kearns:

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found here.